So before anyone gets the knee-jerk reaction to flame me for writing this up, or sing joys of praise because you agree, hear me out. I love the design of the newest leaked BlackBerry 10 London photo. I prefer it's thin slab design over the first leaked London photo. However, there are some glaring flaws that I wanted to address about the image. I've pointed these flaws out in the image above, but I'd like to expand a bit more on each one down here:

1. Uneven corners distorted - Corners are one of the hardest things to repair in graphic work. The fact that there are two corners on the image that look distorted, and one badly smudged, usually suggests some patch work.

2. BlackBerry logo distorted - This one is also a obvious eyesore. The very bottom white dot on the BlackBerry logo is half darkened out. However, this could also be due to image loss and the logo being very close to the shadow. But then again, it's not that far into the shadow for such a dramatic change.

3. Shadowing looks incomplete - If the light was coming from the font angle to leave that dark shadow on the back of the device, I suspect there wouldn't be vague shadowing going in another direction. Depending how one looks at it, I could be wrong, but shadowing just looks off.

4. Screenshot not showing any OS goodies - Usually when a fully legit leak comes out, we get a screenshot that reveals something about the OS running on the device, or a homescreen shot. This screenshot seems to be of a opened media app and therefore cannot be confident that the screenshot is not made up. Plus the image doesn't really go with the "dramatic UI shift" description.

5. Image quality is low to hide mistakes - Perhaps THE signature to creating a fake is to release a image that is low quality with plenty of Jpeg artifacts. This is evidence that some image quality may have been distorted purposely to hide mistakes. To show I didn't purposely distort the image any further when I added the writing to it, I saved it as a quality png file.

I'm not here to bash anyone or anything, but on a scale of 1 -10 on the fake-meter - 1 being NO and 10 being YES, I give it a 8.5. The only thing going for this image is that it resembles the PlayBook in a way, which corresponds to statements made by Lazaridis and Saunders about what the device will look like. Down to brass, any graphic designer with a bit of experience could chug this out in a couple days or less. Even my graphic-savvy amature-ish self was able to hack out a mediocre mock up of the future BB 10 device, with OS and all, in only a couple days.

Grain of salt, folks.

EDIT: Something else I noticed is the image laying on it's side, behind the image standing up, is too short. It should be longer and sticking out beyond the image standing up.

Duh, no kidding. Everyone knows it's not an actual Research in Motion image. It's really obcious from all the points you listed plus the fact that it's not on RIM's standard presentation template. It's a mockup based on descriptions provided by people who have seen the phone.

02-02-2012, 11:29 AM

lonedog

For point number 2, you're wrong, the BB logo isn't distorted, it's been covered by the CrackBerry CB watermark, thus the bottom white dot of the BB appears to be only half white.

For point 3, you're wrong, the shadow isn't distorted. If you look closely at the shadow on the table, you'll notice that the shadow on the back of the device is in line with the shadow on the table coming from the front facing device.

For point 4, it may not show any OS related information, but it does show a reworked media player, so one would assume that it is a picture of what the new media player in OS 10 will look like.

For point 5, one must remember that this is likely a picture of a picture, not the original picture. Everyone knows that when you take a picture of a picture, the copy always loses some of its resolution.

For point 1 I point to my answer of point 5. While I'll admit that corners are hard to touch up, it's likely that the blurriness of the corners is because of loss of screen resolution rather than someone badly trying to touch-up the picture.

Cousin Mark is possibly right, that it's a mockup, but I don't believe it's a mockup made by someone outside of RIM.

I'm not flaming you, just pointing out the errors in your assumptions. Personally I'm excited about the new devices and OS that RIM will be bringing out toward the end of the year and I hope they're as good as this peak.

02-02-2012, 06:30 PM

Joe Jerde

Quote:

Originally Posted by lonedog

For point number 2, you're wrong, the BB logo isn't distorted, it's been covered by the CrackBerry CB watermark, thus the bottom white dot of the BB appears to be only half white.

I'd have to disagree. The watermark is a light orange color. I don't see how that could create such a dark shadow.

Quote:

For point 3, you're wrong, the shadow isn't distorted. If you look closely at the shadow on the table, you'll notice that the shadow on the back of the device is in line with the shadow on the table coming from the front facing device.

The shadowing isn't really the weakest point about this picture as it was most likely two separate images put together, not just one picture of two images. Something I just noticed to prove this, is the image laying on it's side should be longer and sticking out from behind the image that's standing up.

Quote:

For point 4, it may not show any OS related information, but it does show a reworked media player, so one would assume that it is a picture of what the new media player in OS 10 will look like.

That's my point. The image does not relate anything we know of BlackBerry. Any Graphic Designer could come up with that image in less than a day. If there were a native app icon, or home screenshot of UI, I'd be more convinced.

Quote:

For point 5, one must remember that this is likely a picture of a picture, not the original picture. Everyone knows that when you take a picture of a picture, the copy always loses some of its resolution.

I agree, but this image is such a bad quality, so there are a couple possibilities. The image was purposely compressed to a much lower image quality, or, the image has gone through many hands and each time was saved as a jpg file. So, unless the person(s) saving the image had no knowledge of how to retain image quality, which could be possible, it looks to be done on purpose.

With a leak like this, I don't imagine it would be saved more than a few times before it got to CB.

Quote:

For point 1 I point to my answer of point 5. While I'll admit that corners are hard to touch up, it's likely that the blurriness of the corners is because of loss of screen resolution rather than someone badly trying to touch-up the picture.

From my experience, that corner is not just loss of image, it's a smudge. Or, as I was saying, the image on it's side was cropped from another photo and then put in a layer behind the image standing up. If the image wasn't originally transparent, and had a background of it's own, the background would have had to be erased. Which can cause one to have to fix the border around the device when adding it to another background. This could have resulted in the edge being distorted beyond just jpg artifacts.

Quote:

Cousin Mark is possibly right, that it's a mockup, but I don't believe it's a mockup made by someone outside of RIM.
I'm not flaming you, just pointing out the errors in your assumptions. Personally I'm excited about the new devices and OS that RIM will be bringing out toward the end of the year and I hope they're as good as this peak.

No offense taken at all. I would love a BB 10 device to look like that myself. However, I would like it a bit shorter.